We will occasionally get slammed with thousands of messages from a specific sender (usually one we’ve engaged to e-mail all of our employees, and of course they do it at 11 in the morning instead of some low volume off-hours time) which delays mail from all recipients. You can use the sendmail command line to flush the mail queue for messages other than those from a specific sender or other than those to a specific sender.

Using sendmail -qSdomain.gTLD will attempt to delivery messages where the sender matches domain.gTLD. Adding a ‘not’ in front of the ‘S’ attempts to deliver messages where the sender is not the specified domain.

sendmail -q\!Sbadguy.gTLD -v

That ensures all of the other mail is cleared through the queue even though ten thousand messages from a single sender still need to be processed. In real life, bypassing everything with the ‘mail from’ of @em-sj-77.mktomail.com is just

sendmail -q\!Sem-sj-77.mktomail.com -v